Dan Jorgensen's Blog, page 380

So many possibilities

“Stories are different every time you tell them - they allow so many possible narratives.” – David Antin
Born in New York City in February 1932, Antin grew up wanting to be either a scientist or inventor and then spent the first 10 years of his career as a translator of scientific texts and fiction.   His first poem was published in the Kenyon Review in 1959.  By the mid-1960s he had changed careers to poetry and art criticism – fields in which he had a long, distinguished career until his death in 2016.                          
Antin was celebrated internationally for his performative “talk poems” developed in the early 1970s.   He also was a founding faculty member in the visual arts department at the University of California, San Diego, where he taught for 27 years. He authored13 books of poetry, earning a Longview Award for Poetry; fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the PEN Los Angeles Award for Poetry.  For Saturday’s Poem, here is No. 15 from Antin’s, the second hundred: for sid luft
have you noticed how psychological states are all nouns Happiness Sorrow Rage Fear and Shame are never named participially say like Smiling-Preceding-the-Storm or Lining-the-Depths-of-an-Outer-Darkening or Something-Preferred-to-Nothing? its almost worth becoming a professor and obtaining a right to prophesy erecting a science of naming and calling it Pyschology finding a net in our hands meaning that there is something we pursue

Writing something you like to read

“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.” – Meg Cabot 
Born in Indiana on this date in 1967, Meggin “Meg” Cabot is the author of romantic and paranormal fiction for teens and adults, having already written and published over 50 books, led by her 15-book mega-selling series’ The Princess Diaries (also made into two feature films by the same name).  
The recipients of numerous awards, including the New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age, and the IRA/CBC Young Adult Choice, she has had numerous No. 1 New York Timesbestsellers.  Cabot now has more than 25 million copies of her books—children's, young adult, and adult—in print worldwide   .                                          “I was the kind of kid who couldn't really stop making up stories during class,” she said about the genesis of her writing career.   “I didn't do very well academically because I was always drawing these little doodles in the margins of my notebooks and I wasn't bringing home the best grades.”  She said she actually aspired to become an actress until she got into college, took a couple of creative writing classes and made a dramatic career shift. “Then I decided I wanted to become a novelist.”  Never intending to be a screenwriter, she has, nonetheless, done quite a bit of it.  “Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort (than other types of writing). When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.”

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Nervous work, great results

“Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence, to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.” – Shirley Hazzard
Born in Australia on Jan. 30. 1931, Hazzard had dual Australian-American citizenship and spent most of her adult life living in the U.S.   A novelist, short story writer, and essayist, she wrote several award-winning books, including the novels The Bay of Noon, shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, and The Great Fire, winner of the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.  Hazzard also wrote non-fiction, including two books based on her experiences working at the United Nations Secretariat in New York.
After moving around the globe with her diplomat father, Hazzard landed her job with the U.N. in the late 1950s and wrote her first short story, "Woollahra Road" for The New Yorkermagazine in 1960.  More successes with her writing followed and soon she resigned from the U.N. to concentrate full time on her writing.          While her second book The Bay of Noon was her first award winner, it was her third novel, The Guardian, that made her an international best selling writer.  That book follows a pair of sisters from Australia, living very different lives from each other in post-war Britain. 
“It’s a nervous work,” she said about writing.  “The state that you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of.”

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Stick to your writing dreams

Jessica Burkhart is a good example both of and for our next generation of writers.  She’s also a great example of sticking to one’s writing dreams. As an 8th grader, and while recuperating from a major surgical procedure, she decided to start writing to fill her hours and because she was convinced that she could produce articles that were at least as good as those she had been reading in magazines and journals brought to entertain her. 

At first she tried writing what she thought those magazines wanted.  That led to a couple years' worth of rejections.  So she turned to writing about what she knew – in her case a love of animals and her volunteer work with the Humane Society – a formula that more often than not leads to success.  It was a good choice, indeed.

By age 18, she had over 100 published articles in everything from Girls’ Life to The Writer.  At age 19, she signed up for the annual National Novel Writing Month, a challenge to write a 50,000 word (or longer) novel in 30 days.  Again, she chose to write what she knew and loved – horseback riding.

Having started her own blog, she wrote about the experience of doing her first book, and as luck would have it (and luck does indeed often play a part in getting first books accepted) a literary agent who was perusing blogs spotted her post.  The woman liked what she read and signed up Jessica as a client.    Burkhart’s first book, Take The Reins, resulted in The Canterwood Crest series, written for Tweens.  


 [image error] Burkhart, who turns 32 today and whose real last name is Ashley, now has had 20 novels published in several genres and is still going strong.  She’s a testament to “stick-to-it-tiveness” and writing what you know … and taking writers’ moments and turning those dreams into reality.    Happy writing!

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'The Ability to Communicate'

“The ability to communicate is what makes us human and allows technology to advance.” – Alan Alda
Last night Alda, who was born on this date in 1936, was given the Screen Actors Guild “Lifetime Achievement Award.”  His acceptance speech was touching and inspiring and I encourage you to look for it on YouTube. 
In addition to his acting, Alda is a writer and entrepreneur and also founder of a science program for kids called “The Flame Challenge.”    The “Challenge” gives 11-year-old kids the opportunity to ask a question that is then given to scientists around the world to answer “in language that is clearly understandable by an 11-year-old.”
The Flame Challenge is an outgrowth of The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, a cross-disciplinary organization at Stony Brook University in New York and housed, interestingly enough, in the Department of Journalism.  Its goal “is to help scientists and science writers learn to communicate more effectively with the public.”
Alda said that too often both scientists and science writers have amazing things to share but they simply don’t know how to share them in clear and concise language.                             When it comes to “effectively communicating” there’s little doubt Alda succeeds.  A 6-time Emmy and Golden Globe winner, he is best known as Hawkeye Pierce on the long-running show M*A*S*H.   Alda wrote a couple dozen of those shows, including the finale – the most watched TV show in history. He is the first person to win Emmys for acting, writing, and directing in the same series.   And he has written several books, including a memoir with the clever title:  Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself.     “Be brave enough to live life creatively,” Alda advises.  “The creative place where no one else has ever been.”
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'Let stories happen to you'

“There's a reason poets often say, 'Poetry saved my life,' for often the blank page is the only one listening to the soul's suffering, the only one registering the story completely, the only one receiving all softly and without condemnation.”– Clarissa Pinkola Estés
With all the focus on the Academy Award-nominated movie “Roma” and its Mestiza (Native American/Mexica Spanish) star Yalitza Aparacio, it seemed fitting to write a bit about another Mestiza “star,” Pinkola Estés, internationally renowned writer and spoken word performer.
Born on this date in 1945, Pinkola Estés grew up in the oral tradition cantadora, which translates as keeper of the old stories in the Latina tradition.  That tradition came from immigrant, refugee families who could not read nor write, or did so haltingly, and for whom English was a third language overlying their ancient natal languages.
Estés has been a "distinguished visiting scholar" or "diversity scholar" at universities around the world.  Many of her talks are rooted in her books, among them the international bestsellers Women Who Run With the Wolves and her Spoken Word masterpiece How To Be An Elder: Myths and Stories of The Dangerous Old Woman.   She also is a managing editor and columnist writing on politics, spirituality, and culture at the newsblog TheModerateVoice.com, and a columnist for The National Catholic Reporter online.                                       Her advice to new writers also is a challenge:  “I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and your laughter 'til they bloom; 'til you yourself burst into bloom.”


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The 'Affect' of Poetry

“The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.” – Derek Walcott

Nobel laureate Walcott, born in January, 1930, was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright whose works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros, which many critics view "as his major achievement.       Besides the Nobel, Walcott received many literary awards including an Obie for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.  Walcott said he never separated the writing of poetry from prayer.  “I have grown up believing it a vocation,” he said (shortly before his death in 2017), “a religious vocation.”
For Saturday’s Poem, here is Walcott’s,
Love after Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.


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'Writing an honest story'

“I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches.”– Lynn Coady
Born in Nova Scotia on this date in 1970, Coady now makes her home in Toronto.  A successful creative and journalistic writer, she holds degrees from Carleton University and the University of British Columbia and is credited with developing a specialized course in writing the short story at Athabasca University in Edmonton. 
Coady started writing while still in college and authored her first book, the award-winning Strange Heaven, while earning her Master of Fine Arts degree.  Since then she’s combined a career in teaching, editing and writing, penning several best-selling novels – led by Play the Monster Blind and Mean Boy– and dozens of short stories, many compiled in her critically acclaimed collection Hellgoing.   For that book Coady was named for the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize, which often is favorably compared to the Pulitzer Prize.  In 2017, she was honored as a jury member for that same award.        Winner of the Canadian Authors Association/Air Canada Award for the best writer under 30, as well as the Dartmouth Book and Writing Award for fiction, her articles and reviews have been featured in leading publications throughout Canada and the U.S.   Since moving to Toronto, she has written several plays and is a regular contributor to the Globe and Mail, also known as “Canada’s National Newspaper.”
“It makes me proud not just to be a Canadian writer but to be a Canadian, to live in a country where we treat our writers like movie stars.”



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Mining for the details

“As a kid, I liked to write, but I didn't think that was a viable career choice. My dream, actually, was to be a white girl rapper and join Salt-N-Pepa - which obviously was a much more viable career choice.”– Karen Abbott

Born in Philadelphia on this date in 1973, Abbott is now a leading author of  historical non-fiction, including the best sellers Sin in the Second City, American Rose, and Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy, also slated for a TV mini-series. 
Abbott started writing while in college and chose journalism as her focus.  Her writing for newspapers and magazines in the Philadelphia area led to her interest in writing about history and historical events and ultimately to writing Sin in the Second City, set in Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.            While she now resides in New York City, where she is working on more books, she continues to write journalistically as a contributor to Smithsonian magazine’s history blog, "Past Imperfect,” and as a regular to the New York Timesseries “Disunion,” about the Civil War.  Her work also has often been featured in The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
“I think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details,” Abbott said.  “The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you.”



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'Like being a detective'

“I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.” – Joseph Wambaugh
Often listed among the greatest crime writers – for both nonfiction AND fiction – Wambaugh was born on this date in 1937.  Growing up in Pittsburgh, PA, the son of a police officer, he joined the U.S. Marines at age 17, served several years in the Corps, then followed his dad into police work, starting with the Los Angeles Police Department. 
In 1971, his first book, The New Centurions, was a critical and financial success, but he continued working as a police officer while writing, winning even more awards and success with his second book, The Blue Knight.   “(But) When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice,” Wambaugh said.  “The Onion Field made me a real writer. And . . . I couldn't be a cop anymore.”     
                            Many of his novels are set in Los Angeles and its surroundings, featuring Los Angeles police officers as protagonists, but his nonfiction books like The Blooding and Fire Lover: A True Story, are set in other parts of the country and England   Wambaugh has been nominated for 4 Edgar awards winning 3, and named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.  To date he has written 16 novels and 5 nonfiction books, all bestsellers and many winners of numerous awards. 
He said when he writes, he’s very focused.  “I write a thousand words a day,” he said.  “Nothing will stop me, I mean nothing, until the book is finished. I'm disciplined in spite of myself.”


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